OK, not really. But this
nugget from a New
York Times story on
how the bureau kept two investigations under wraps this summer so as
not to appear to be meddling in the presidential campaign could lead
you to wonder.

In
August . . . the F.B.I. grappled with whether to issue subpoenas in
the Clinton Foundation case, which . . . was in its preliminary
stages. The investigation, based in New York, had not developed much
evidence and was based mostly on information that had surfaced in
news stories and the book “Clinton Cash,” according to several
law enforcement officials briefed on the case.

Oh, neat, “Clinton
Cash,” the partisan hit job published last year by Breitbart’s
editor-at-large, Peter Schweizer, and later adapted
into a documentary that
was executive produced by former Breitbart chairman and current Trump
campaign CEO Stephen Bannon. Next the FBI will tell us that Roger
Stone was the special agent in charge of the investigation.

If you have forgotten
about “Clinton Cash,” Digby laid out a
nice case against it and Schweizer.
The short version is that the book was one in a long, long line
of thinly sourced tales about the Clintons that have made millions of
dollars for various right-wing writers and publishing houses since
the early 1990s. For that matter, these tales sold a lot of copies of
the Times as well, when it went all in chasing Whitewater stories
early in Bill Clinton’s presidency.

“Clinton Cash,”
published just as Hillary Clinton was announcing her own campaign for
the presidency, is an obvious effort to cash in early to what
will likely be four to eight years’ worth of salacious and
worthless investigations of her upcoming administration. It
immediately ran into the same problem that dozens of anti-Clinton
books have encountered over the years: It contained
more bullshit than
a waste pond on a cattle ranch. The publisher had to make
revisions to
the book’s later editions. Schweizer was forced
to admit in
both interviews and in the conclusion of his book that he had not
quite made the case he was trying to present.

Senior FBI and
Justice Department officials came to the same conclusion, much to the
apparent dissatisfaction of some agents, as the Times reported:

In
meetings, the Justice Department and senior F.B.I. officials agreed
that making the Clinton Foundation investigation public could
influence the presidential race and suggest they were favoring Mr.
Trump. . . . They agreed to keep the case open but wait until after
the election to determine their next steps. The move infuriated some
agents, who thought that the F.B.I.’s leaders were reining them in
because of politics.

Or
possibly the agents were being reined in because they were being
snookered by the right-wing noise machine. The right has been doing
this for 25 years — trying to turn the nation’s criminal
investigatory apparatus into an arm of the Republican Party for the
sole purpose of destroying the Clintons.

And
if it can’t get the GOP what it wants? Just this week Rep. Elijah
Cummings, ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee,
mentioned the pressure that Republicans on the committee have
been putting
on the FBI to
turn up something — anything — on Hillary Clinton regarding her
private email server and suggested the GOP is going to start
investigating the bureau and its director, James Comey, over the
agency’s failure.

This
latest blowup is simply the newest chapter in better than two decades
of Republicans co-opting the FBI and other investigative agencies in
service of chasing whatever dark Clintonian shadows they can conjure
from the fever swamps of right-wing media and websites. No charge is
too spurious or absurd, which is how the nation wound up with the
specter in the 1990s of a Republican congressmanshooting
cantaloupes in his backyard to
“prove” that Vince Foster could not have committed suicide.

It
is not new, of course, for right-wing demagogues to use
the FBI to
chase down false and inflammatory garbage. But even with its history,
one of the ways the bureau maintains legitimacy as an institution is
by giving the appearance of a nonpartisan actor. If its agents are so
determined to base investigations on right-wing con jobs that their
bosses do have to rein them in, then it will lose whatever moral
authority it wants to claim.

I hadn't hear of "Clinton Cash" here it is so you can make up your own mind